


Flames Just Create Us

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Post-Episode: Revolution of the Daleks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:48:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28753881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Yasmin Khan had thought that the day the Doctor came back to the fam would be a cause for celebration, and for a moment or two, it had been. Then there had been a lack of explanation, an alien invasion, a face from the past, and a decision that would leave the TARDIS considerably emptier. Now, alone with the Time Lady who changed her life, Yaz tries to pick up the pieces left behind by their time apart, but can either of them truly move on when the void between them has hurt them both in more ways than one?
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Comments: 13
Kudos: 62





	Flames Just Create Us

**Author's Note:**

> And here it is... the post-Revolution Thasmin angst nobody asked for.

“I could always use the TARDIS to go back… arrive an hour after you guys… change the timeline. Then we’d have more time together.”

Something cracks in the Doctor’s voice when she speaks the words aloud. It’s as though something inside her that she’s been trying to keep hidden finally breaks, and Yaz looks at her out of the corner of her eye, caught between empathy and compassion, between anger and pain. She wants to forgive her. She wants to move on. She wants, as they stand by the console together, to reach over and pull her friend into the hug she so desperately needs, and which Yaz has yearned, for months, to give her. And yet something stops her; something holds her back, a flicker of fury and resentment that she can’t quite extinguish and which smoulders away in the pit of her stomach as she blinks back tears and clenches her hands into fists at her sides, trying to work out what Ryan and Graham’s departure means for them both.

She supposes she ought to be happy. Hadn’t she always wanted this? Hadn’t she always craved the chance to shine; the chance to impress the Doctor; the chance to save the day? That’s what the previous ten months had been about, only now… well, she’s been robbed of one chance to play the hero thanks to Jack’s high-tech intervention, only to be gifted the opportunity again on a plate as the boys left the TARDIS.

So why doesn’t she want this?

Yaz had imagined it, in idle moments; imagined it being just her and the Doctor, pictured the two of them careening around time and space at top speed, saving the day and fighting off aliens. And yet now… now it feels wrong. The TARDIS seems impossibly quiet without Ryan and Graham, despite the fact that mere seconds have passed since they’d closed the door behind themselves; Yaz is acutely aware that the Doctor’s attention is split between the two of her friends who have just left her behind and the one at her side, but she knows that at any moment, the Time Lady’s focus will snap over to her, laser-sharp and almost suffocating in its intensity as the Doctor struggles to process what she’s feeling. If the broken timbre of her voice is anything to go by, Yaz knows her friend will need support to move past this, and yet… can she provide that? Can she truthfully say she feels ready to do that?

Ryan had told her that the Doctor needed her. But after the last ten months… the fact she’s here with the Time Lady at all is intoxicatingly overwhelming, tinged with a hint of disbelief and unreality that makes Yaz wonder whether she’s imagining the whole thing. Perhaps it’s all a nightmare that she’s going to wake up from, only to find herself back in reality, with Doctor still gone, but at least she’d have Ryan and Graham by her side. She hadn’t appreciated them enough. She hadn’t listened to them enough. Obsessed by her quest to find the Doctor, she’d allowed herself to be blinkered by her mission, and she’d brushed them aside. She feels a swooping sense of guilt about that and yearns to run after them; yearns to apologise; yearns to make it right, but the thought of doing so and leaving the Doctor entirely alone in the TARDIS, even temporarily, seems cruel. The Time Lady has just lost two of her friends; for her to walk out now, even briefly, would be too much for her to stand, and Yaz can’t bear the thought of being away from the Doctor and the ship now that she has them back at last.

Yaz feels torn. Acutely and agonisingly torn; desperately longing to follow her friends for one final goodbye, while feeling a reckless, giddy sense of euphoria at being back in the TARDIS, and wanting nothing more than to suggest a trip to somewhere exotic – that meringue place had sounded good – to take the Doctor’s mind off things. She tries to tell herself that they can see Ryan and Graham at any time; tries to tell herself that there’s no limit to how many times they can come back to Sheffield, and yet this feels like a final severance, for reasons she can’t quite put into words.

A small part of her wonders, irrationally, if Ryan and Graham are sick of her. Wonders whether her obsession with finding the Doctor had alienated them too intensely; wonders whether she’d pushed them away with such acute desperation that it’s too late to make amends. She knows she’s being illogical; knows that they’ll always care for her, and yet the thought is sharp and painful, her mind determined to convince her that Ryan and Graham’s compassionate final words had been lies. Another part of her wonders if she’d only spent more time with them on Earth, perhaps she could have convinced them to stay; perhaps this is her fault, perhaps she should have done and said more, spent more time with them, said the right things…

And then there’s the fact that her chest still aches with the loss of the Doctor, despite the fact that her friend is stood beside her now, equally lost for words and equally shellshocked by Ryan and Graham’s departure. It’s too much to take in; after the months of yearning and longing and praying and hoping, after months trying to ignore all that she’d metaphorically burned down in favour of trying to find the Doctor, after months of wishing for this very moment, now she feels… what? Unsatisfied? Confused? She ought to feel glad; ought to feel elated that the Time Lady came back to them at all. Instead, there is anger there still, and resentment that she can’t quite shake; irrational, she supposes, but white-hot all the same. There’s a lingering sense of sadness that starts somewhere in her upper chest and wraps around her throat, a sadness that had driven her search for the Doctor, but now seems to belong both to her and to the boys, as she stands at the console staring at the doors, as though preserving their imprint.

“It’s OK to be sad,” Yaz manages, her voice choked with tears, but the words seem hopelessly inadequate.

“Yaz…” the Doctor begins uncertainly after a moment, but before she can even look over at her, Yaz bolts. There’s too many unspoken words between them, and so she picks a corridor at random, offers a silent prayer to the ship, and prays she’ll end up in her bedroom.

* * *

Guilt.

The Doctor remembers the guilt, white-hot and all-consuming, burning through her like a wildfire as she’d looked from Yaz to Ryan to Graham and back again. She can still feel Yaz’s hands on her shoulders; can still see the rage and pain in her friend’s eyes as she’d shoved her, hard, across Graham’s living room in a visceral reaction that had taken the Doctor by surprise. Yaz is calm. Yaz is measured. Yaz isn’t prone to outbursts of random emotion, and it hadn’t been until Ryan had explained the duration of her absence that the Doctor had understood.

Guilt.

She still feels it now. As she sits in her workshop, attempting to placate her ship after their prolonged separation, she wants nothing more than to go to Yaz and begin apologising to her, but she can still picture the look on her friend’s face as she’d run away from her, tears tracking down her cheeks.

The Doctor knows she’s never been much good at emotions, but she truly doesn’t know how to deal with this; doesn’t know how to apologise or how to reassure Yaz, who still seems impossibly afraid that the Doctor will leave again. The Doctor isn’t stupid; she knows this won’t last forever, but the fact that it preys so heavily on her friend’s mind is painful, and coupled with Ryan and Graham’s recent departure, it weighs on her own mind too, and she wonders how it will feel when Yaz makes the same choice and walks away from her.

She remembers being on her own.

She remembers walking the Earth alone, trying to work out who she was and what had happened.

She remembers the gaps in her memory, which had done nothing to assuage the pain in both of her hearts; the same pain she’s feeling now, despite what she’d told Ryan and Graham. One heart isn’t happy; a part of her is, the same part of her which is glad to still have Yaz with her, regardless of the circumstances, but it’s not her whole heart. And she’s afraid now; she’s aware of what she could lose, and aware of how far she can fall.

She sighs and places her hand against the wall of the TARDIS, trying to glean comfort from the familiarity of her ship.

It’s not enough.

* * *

Yaz sleeps.

Or rather, she lays motionless in the darkness of her room, her eyes fixed on the swirling galaxies picked out in silver paint and LED lightbulbs across the ceiling, yearning for sleep to claim her as its own. She snatches the odd half an hour here and there, but nightmares tear her from slumber each time she manages to drift off, and so when the artificial window simulates a sunrise, she gets up with robotic stiffness, dressing on autopilot and then perching on the edge of her mattress with a detached expression. It’s been a long time since she’s slept in a proper bed, and as she smooths the covers down mechanically, she wonders how long it will take her to readjust. She’s in the midst of that thought when there’s a loud, theatrical knock on the door, and for several seconds she just stares at it in confusion before realising she ought to respond.

“Yeah?” she calls, her voice scratchy with the lack of sleep.

“Can I come in?” the Doctor replies, and Yaz swallows thickly, wondering if she has time to glance in the mirror or not, and she pats her hair down half-heartedly. It’s not like the Doctor will notice.

“Yeah,” she shouts back, drawing her arms across her chest protectively and forcing a wide, artificial smile onto her face which falters as the Time Lady opens the door, her eyes still wide and haunted.

“I made breakfast,” the Doctor says, her cheeks flushing as she speaks. “I mean… I don’t know if it’s… I did my best… the TARDIS helped… I didn’t know what you’d… there’s… there’s pancakes and waffles and… stuff.”

“You cook?” Yaz blurts, raising her eyebrows, and something about the thought is so comical that some of the awkwardness between them alleviates. “Since when?”

“Had a few lessons in my time,” the Doctor’s mouth quirks up into a bashful smile. “I’m not sure how edible any of this is, so come and give it a go and if it’s rubbish we’ll just… go somewhere and get something.”

“Alright,” Yaz gets to her feet, rolling her shoulders. “Let’s give it a go.”

* * *

The Doctor had understood, of course. The second she’d stepped into the spare TARDIS – the term makes her flinch; it’s so disrespectful on a core level, and yet it’s the most convenient way to think of it – and seen the Post-Its and the sleeping bag, she’d understood.

Yaz’s fury and the shove are beginning to make increasing amounts of sense, and she wants nothing more than to talk to her friend about it; to let her know how deeply she appreciates Yaz’s actions, and how guilty she feels. She wants to tell Yaz that she’s going to make amends; wants to thank her for never giving up hope. And yet she doesn’t know how. She can’t find the words. And so she hopes against hope that the human saying is true, and that her actions speak louder than anything she could ever say.

* * *

They’re halfway through the stack of pancakes – which Yaz is sure is self-replicating, because it doesn’t appear to be going down – when the subject is broached.

“Yaz, I… we need to talk about… things. I saw your stuff in the TARDIS… the notes… the sleeping bag,” the Doctor begins, and Yaz feels her heart plummet. Looking down at the plate before her, she spreads Nutella generously over the pancake there, biting down on her lower lip to keep herself from lashing out as she concentrates on layering the chocolate spread in perfect swirls across the breakfast item, refusing to look at the Doctor.

“So…” the Doctor asks, apparently expecting a response before launching into a monologue, which is most unlike her. “Can we talk about it?”

“About what?” Yaz looks up, forcing herself to smile and raise her head enough for the Doctor to see it. “These pancakes? They’re great. What were you worried about? They’re the best I’ve had in a long time. Can’t believe you’ve been holding out on u- me. All this time you’ve been a gourmet chef?”

“Yaz, were you liv-”

“What about where to go next? Because that meringue place sounds pretty amazing, and you did sort of promise.”

“Yaz, I need to-”

“Can we not?” Yaz pleads, allowing her false expression to drop as she finally looks up at her friend. “Please, can we not?”

The Doctor hesitates for a moment, and then nods.

* * *

The Doctor understands Yaz’s reasoning.

How can she not? She’s spent months… years… decades refusing to talk about the things she’s experienced. She’s fairly certain there’s several aeons worth of trauma from her last two regenerations kicking around in the back of her mind that she ought to deal with, but repressing everything seems far more pragmatic; there’s no time for her to break down, no time for her to address things, not when her every waking moment is focused on how to make things right with Yaz, or how to keep her safe.

Not talking about things? Well, it’s working so far. She might wake up screaming, picturing the child she can’t quite reconcile as her past self being experimented upon; she might get so angry that she punches out several roundels in the console room; she might scream into the pillows on her bed each night, as she lays awake and curses her own race, but she paints a brave face on each morning and tries to pretend that everything is normal.

Her best enemy is dead, her people are gone, and her planet is ravaged.

She’s broken her best friend’s heart.

She’s not who she thinks she is.

But none of that matters.

Life goes on, in relative silence.

* * *

And so they don’t talk about it.

The days stretch on, and they skirt around the issue of their time apart, and Ryan and Graham’s departure. They travel, they run, they save the day; same old, same old.

Only between the planets and the satellites and the spaceships and the time periods, they don’t talk. There’s no laughter, no chatter, no warmth. They retreat to their respective rooms, both of them unsure and afraid of how things have changed.

Yaz half wants to go home. Part of her feels drawn to the flat in Sheffield; the flat she hasn’t set foot in since… well, she flinches away from that thought, cramming it down in her mind as though doing so might remove all trace of it from her memory. She wants to see her sister again; wants to embrace her mother and gently chide her father for his conspiracy theories. And yet she wonders whether her family would even want to speak to her; wonders how they’d respond to seeing her, and the thought of another stinging rejection makes her shudder, and so she vetoes the idea.

The subject of the ten months grows and grows, the elephant in the room growing increasingly larger when said room is influenced by dimensional engineering. It settles over her and the Doctor like a lead weight, hanging over them as they pass each other in the corridors or share a meal together in the kitchen; an ever-present spectre at a feast that is haunted with enough ghosts already. The lingering ache of the time Yaz spent without the Doctor still feels like a physical pain in her chest, and while she strives to ignore it, there are times it robs her of breath; times she looks at the Doctor and feels as though the ache has manifested into a physical wound, gaping and agonising enough to make her press her hand to her sternum, as though checking she’s still whole.

Yaz still doesn’t sleep. Unconsciousness comes in fits and starts, escaping her as its chased away by the monsters which haunt her dreams; monsters bearing her family’s faces; Ryan’s face; Graham’s face; the Master’s face; and, universal and pervasive as ever, the Doctor’s. Each time Yaz wakes shaking and sobbing, she clutches her arms to her chest and curls into a foetal position, remembering the long nights on the strange TARDIS’s floor; the Post-It notes, the agony of not-knowing, and all that the not-knowing had taken from her, as it had crept into every aspect of her life and destroyed it all, piece by piece.

Yaz thinks about it now; about how she’d with her arms wrapped around her legs as she’d leant her head against the strange console, staring up at her wall of Post-It notes as though doing so from a new angle might lend her fresh perspective, as though the pieces might suddenly click into place and offer up a set of coordinates or some kind of clue as to where the Doctor had gone. It never had; it had merely made everything harder to read and made Yaz acutely aware of the cool draft billowing from the grates in the floor below her, but she had taken the opportunity to close her eyes and rest her head on her knees, sometimes trying to mentally count back how many days it had been since she’d packed a rucksack, walked out of the family home, and set up camp here. There had been a row about it – several rows, both in person and over the phone – but she’d had no desire to go back, not until she’d found her friend.

There had been the suspicion, of course, that the Doctor would not come back to them, and her eyes still snap open in the middle of the night, panicked at that thought, keen to avoid the spectral version of the Doctor who plagues her dreams. There had been every chance that the Doctor had been obliterated by the Death Particle; every chance that she was blowing through the universe like stardust. Yaz had had to force herself to remain optimistic and driven; she had had to force herself to keep hunting, hunting, hunting for clues in her every waking moment, and yet the hard facts of the matter had been that her best friend could have been dead, and she would have had no way of knowing.

Holding her legs against her chest seems to alleviate some of the dull ache over her heart that she still feels whenever she so much as remembers such a notion; it makes her feel as though she’s holding herself together in the wake of a tragedy, which, in a way, she is. She closes her eyes and presses the heels of her hands against them, telling herself that after all of that, she had been wrong, that the Doctor is still out there somewhere in the depths of the ship, and yet it had been ten months with no news, no messages, and no word, and the anger and resentment still bubble in the pit of her stomach.

The other inescapable truth is that thanks to the Doctor, Yaz knows she can’t go back to Earth, not now. It had never been a consideration; never been something she had given serious thought to, even as Ryan had explained himself and then looked to her for her own answer. Yes, she wants more time with the Doctor; yes, she wants to see more of the wonders she knows are out there, beyond her own planet. But there’s also the fact that nothing remains for her on Earth; in her singular obsession, she has burned all her bridges, and this is her punishment, she supposes, a life in exile among the stars.

That thought robs her of breath each time she thinks it; it tips her into acute panic and sends her spiralling into pure terror as her mind, fed on trauma and repression and anxiety and grief and frustration, shows her snapshot after snapshot of what her life will become.

The Doctor, unageing and eternally youthful.

Yaz, wizened and old.

The Doctor, running for her life.

Yaz, lagging behind, limping and decrepit.

The Doctor, head bowed and tears streaming down her face.

Yaz, broken and lifeless, crumpled on the floor of an alien craft.

It terrifies her, and each time she pictures it, she presses her hands to her mouth and sobs into them as silently as she is able, desperate not to betray herself to the ship or its owner.

* * *

The ship makes her aware of it gradually. Quietly at first, and then with increasing volume until it consumes her attention entirely, captivating her in the worst possible way.

Yaz is crying.

Her breaths are long and shaky; her grief and terror are so acutely visceral that the Doctor can feel her own body beginning to respond empathically, dragging her into fear and sorrow of her own. All of the emotions she’s been striving to repress instead jostle for space in her consciousness, and she crumples over where she’s sat, clutching her hands to her chest as she rests her head on her knees and inhales shallowly, trying to force air she doesn’t really need into lungs that she doesn’t fully understand. It’s a painful reminder of all that’s been taken from her and all of her that’s been exploited, and as she squeezes her eyes shut, constellations pop behind her eyes; a monochromatic kaleidoscope that’s so unlike the space outside of the TARDIS that she laughs bitterly.

She wants to go to Yaz.

She wants to run from Yaz.

She wants to confront Yaz, and force her to talk about everything she’s not telling her.

She fears being asked the same questions in return; fears her ability to keep her silence when faced with such overt compassion and hostility, the two emotions held together in Yaz like a double-edged sword.

She stays where she is.

She stays silent.

But she cries.

* * *

They run.

They save people.

They save planets.

They come back to the TARDIS.

They don’t talk.

They run.

They save people.

They save planets.

They come back to the TARDIS.

They don’t talk.

Repeat. 

* * *

The Doctor knows, logically, that the TARDIS hasn’t grown – well, it might’ve done, but not in the way she pictures – and yet the ship seems somehow larger and emptier without Ryan and Graham, and the ship herself bereft of their presence, as though mirroring the Doctor’s emotions back at her. They’ve always jested that the Doctor brings home waifs and strays that she finds soft spots in her hearts for, but they both know that it’s the TARDIS that lets her keep these wanderers, the TARDIS that feeds them, the TARDIS that houses them, and the TARDIS that becomes their home.

Without Ryan and Yaz’s friendly banter, and without Graham pottering around the place leaving a trail of crumbs behind himself, the ship seems different. The Doctor intuits that the TARDIS is keeping her and Yaz apart where possible, as though afraid what might come spilling out of both of them if they were to be in close physical proximity and bereft of an adventure, and she’s not sure whether to be grateful or frustrated.

The Doctor knows that Ryan and Graham aren’t dead, and yet she feels a pervasive, perverse need to talk about them; to share her memories of them with someone, as though doing so might resurrect their presence enough to fill the empty hallways with their energy and voices. She wants to discuss them with Yaz, and yet she’s unsure how her friend might react to such discussion; she’s wary of making her angry, and so she keeps to herself and allows the ship to lead her away, locking herself away in her study or her workshop and trying to keep busy, lest guilt and sorrow threaten to overwhelm her, and her charade of coping fall away.

* * *

The TARDIS without Ryan and Graham is strange. The basketball court appears to have vanished entirely, or perhaps just moved itself to somewhere that Yaz can’t find it. Frustrated, she wanders the corridors until she locates one of the football pitches, then snatches up a ball and sits with it cradled in her lap, as though doing so might make the black and white checkerboard pattern morph into the lurid orange of the sport Ryan had loved so much. She isn’t sure how long she sits like that, sometimes passing the ball from hand to hand, or rolling it around her waist, smiling as she does so and remembering the stupid warmups that she and Ryan had once done, inventing silly drills and trick shots that she’s sure professional players wouldn’t approve of. When she returns to her room with the ball, she wakes up the next morning to find it transformed, the burnt ochre material cool under her hands as she lays them reverently against it, then pats the wall in gratitude.

The kitchen seems to have ceased providing bread. Yaz isn’t sure if this is in any way linked to Graham, but she feels a stab of annoyance all the same. When she goes through the cupboards in search of an alternative snack, she finds a half-empty jar of Marmite and a mostly-gone packet of chocolate Hobnobs that she can’t quite bring herself to eat or throw away, and so she brings both back to her bedroom, setting them down beside the basketball in a kind of makeshift shrine.

She’s reminded of the last time they’d all been together, and the moment when the Doctor had come back to them; the moment when everything had changed. The Doctor’s return had been too much for Yaz to process; as the Doctor had beamed at them from across Graham’s lounge, having given her hopelessly inadequate explanation, Yaz had felt anger and frustration and pain and grief well up inside of her, white hot and insidious and overwhelming. Every second in the ten months in which she’d cried or raged or pored over clues had come back to her; every second in which she’d abandoned hope or tried to keep her optimism alive; all of that had condensed into a festering mess of emotions that she couldn’t quite unpick and wasn’t sure she wanted to, for fear of what might have come spilling out of her; something she still fears now. In that instant, after she’d spent ten months furious at the Doctor, yearning for the Doctor, livid at her best friend, aching to talk to her, once the Time Lady had been stood there, beaming around at them like no time had passed as though that made everything OK, Yaz had felt nothing but confusion.

The grin and the half-hearted explanation hadn’t negated the hours she’d spent struggling to sleep on the floor of the spare TARDIS in an uncomfortable sleeping bag. It hadn’t negated the nightmares she’d woken up screaming from, or the dark places her mind had taken her in the small hours of the morning, as her optimism had leached away. It hadn’t negated the moment in which she’d first realised that the Doctor might well be dead, and the ensuing crisis as she’d wondered whether that would be better or worse than the Doctor having simply... moved on. She’d wanted this moment for so long, hadn’t she? She’d dreamed of the Doctor standing before her, and yet once she was there... she’d wanted to scream. She’d wanted to hug her. She’d wanted to cry. She’d wanted to rage. She still wants to do all of those things, and she’s unsure which takes precedence.

“We were worried about you!” she’d exploded, without really planning to, and then stepped forwards and shoved the Doctor hard, catching her off-guard, and the Time Lady had stumbled backwards with wide, betrayed eyes as Yaz had clenched her fists at her sides.

“What?” the Doctor had asked, her smile gone as Ryan and Graham had looked from her to Yaz with incredulity. “How long’s it been?”

Worse, as Yaz had looked from the Doctor to Jack, understanding had dawned on her slowly, alongside horror, and she’d felt her heart sink. She’d been right. After all of the arguing that Ryan and Graham had done with her, after all of their insistences and reassurances that the Doctor had not been in need of rescuing... the Doctor _had_ needed saving. And Yaz hadn’t been able to do that; she’d had to remain trapped on Earth, enfeebled and disgustingly inept, while this handsome man had got the Doctor out of prison instead.

Part of her had wanted to gloat to her friends. Part of her had wanted to elbow Ryan and Graham hard in the sides and crow ‘I told you so!’ while doing a small triumphant jig; the other half of her had wanted nothing more than to crawl away and hang her head in shame, accepting herself as the failure she so clearly was, and she still yearns to do that; she’s still full of hot embarrassment and humiliation that she couldn’t save her friend. She couldn’t even so much as find her friend. Instead, Jack, charming, charismatic Jack, had muscled in and done what she had been unable to, and she’d felt – and still feels – powerless and defeminised. She feels as though she’s not good enough for the Doctor. She feels as though she’s not _worthy_ of the Doctor.

Where once there had been Ryan and Graham to reassure her, now… now they’re gone. There’s no one there to bolster her; no one there to temper her anger at the Doctor; no one there to buffer her and the Doctor as they bounce around the TARDIS, both of them studiously avoiding each other.

There’s less laughter in the corridors now; less banter and fewer jokes. She hasn’t anyone to muck around with, and the silence is becoming oppressive. Once or twice she thinks about texting Ryan back – he’s been WhatsApping her almost daily – but the thought of actually speaking to him is uncomfortable for reasons she can’t quite understand, and so she leaves his messages on read, ignores Graham’s calls, and tries her hardest to put on a brave face.

* * *

Silence is no longer the answer.

Despite the Doctor’s best intentions, it’s growing harder and harder to feign composure with each passing day; harder and harder to bounce around with her best Doctor voice, saving the world, stopping the bad guys, and averting danger. She thinks Yaz knows; she’s always been unusually perceptive of her friend’s emotions, and the Doctor knows it’s an inevitability now that the question will eventually be asked, and that she will be forced to confront her metaphorical demons head-on; the trauma of Gallifrey and prison, threatening to consume her.

The Doctor can tell, despite her relative ineptitude regarding others, that Yaz’s pretence is growing increasingly difficult too. She knows her friend, and can see the cracks developing; the way Yaz sometimes spaces out while they’re on adventures, or uses a snappish tone of voice, or clenches her fists as they discuss something. Flashes of temper and flashes of trauma; two things the Doctor knows better than most, because they stare back at her each time she looks in the mirror.

She wants to address it; she knows she needs to, because she can’t face Yaz suffering the same fate as Clara. She’d _known_ that Clara had been struggling, but had refused to address it for fear of her friend’s response, and then she’d looked on in silence as Clara had grown increasingly reckless, increasingly brash, increasingly confident… and then been forced to watch as she’d died in agony on a cold London street.

The thought of that happening to Yaz, all that repressed trauma eating away at her until she becomes convinced she has something to prove, is anathema to the Doctor, it makes her physically nauseous, and she knows she can’t let it happen. There are people on Earth who would never forgive her, and she’d never forgive herself either; whatever punishment the universe saw fit to impose upon her, she would gladly take. Prison? She’d take a thousand prisons for a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million, but it she knows it would never bring Yaz back.

She knows what she has to do.

She dreads it. But she knows she must.

* * *

“Do you think I can’t hear you?” the Doctor asks one evening, her tone entirely conversational. They’re in the same room for once; the two of them ensconced on opposite sides of the third-best lounge, the Doctor engrossed in a 3D model of a planetary system that Yaz doesn’t recognise, while Yaz flips through a novel without much interest, propped on a sofa in front of the fire.

“What?” Yaz mumbles, without looking up. She’s not convinced about this book; the main character seems far too listless to be of any real appeal, and the plot is rather lacking.

“When you cry, at night,” the Doctor says softly, only just loud enough for Yaz to make out the words. “I can hear you. The ship… I don’t… it’s complicated, but it… I can hear you.”

Yaz sets the book down on the sofa beside her, bowing her head and clenching her hands into fists in her lap, willing herself not to cry.

“I want to talk,” the Doctor continues, her voice growing a little bolder. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but I need to say things… I need you to understand… I need…”

“What about what I need? What about what I want?”

“That matters to me,” the Doctor tells her, setting her paintbrush down and looking at her – really looking at her – for the first time in a long time. “But I know that if we don’t talk about these things and we keep going like this, we’re both going to end up… I don’t know, but it’s not going to be good. It’s not going to be happy. _You’re_ not happy, Yaz; I know that, but you keep telling me you don’t want to talk and there’s never been a good moment to force the issue, and then I don’t… I don’t know how to talk to you. I don’t know how to bring it up because the last thing I want is for you to be angry at me or upset with me – or even more angry or upset; I don’t know because you don’t tell me anything, so I don’t know how you’re feeling, and instead we’re just living every day in this miasma of weirdness where neither of us actually talk about the elephant in the room, which is no longer an elephant, but more of a blue whale at this point. Neither of us wants to bring it up, so we don’t, and every night I hear you crying and every night I want to come and help, but I don’t…” her voice cracks. “I don’t know how. You’re my friend, and I don’t know how to help you, or how to make this right.”

“There’s things you can’t make right,” Yaz breathes, and there’s a pause before the Doctor gets up, crosses the space between them and plonks herself down on the rug in front of Yaz, her legs crossed and her elbows propped on her knees like a child. Lit from behind by the flickering from the fire, she glows almost ethereally, and the sight is so much like Yaz’s nightmares that it takes all of her willpower not to flinch.

“Like what?”

“Like… it doesn’t matter.”

“It does,” the Doctor reaches over and takes Yaz’s hands in her own, and something about the rare physical contact catches Yaz off guard. “Tell me. Please. Because we can’t carry on bottling this up.”

“You can’t fix my life,” Yaz confesses, her voice little more than a whisper, and to her shame she starts to cry. Turning her face away, she lets the tears drip down her cheeks unhindered as she continues: “You can’t fix what I’ve done.”

“What have you done?” there’s no judgement in the Doctor’s tone; just open curiosity and a sense of compassion that Yaz feels is hopelessly misplaced. “Yaz?”

“I…” she frees one hand from the Doctor’s and wipes her eyes, but she’s unable to stop the tears now they’ve started. “I left my job. I tried to use my shifts to do research, try to find you… I wasn’t concentrating… I wasn’t… I couldn’t… and they… they called me in and… they gave me this ultimatum, and I walked out.”

“Oh Yaz.”

“And then my parents found out and they just… they told me I was being w-weird and obsessive and that I needed to… to… l-let it go and m-move on and I couldn’t… I couldn’t j-just… I needed to…”

“Let what go?”

“You!” Yaz looks up at the Doctor then, their eyes meeting. “They told me I needed to let you go and move on with my life but how could I? How could I do that, how could I just forget about you when you showed me wonders and a different way of being and you just… you made me realise things about myself that I didn’t know and I just… I couldn’t let you go. I _wouldn’t_. And I told them that, I told them about trying to find you and they didn’t understand. How could they? They didn’t want to understand, so I left.”

“Oh Yaz,” the Doctor says again, her voice shaking. “You…”

“I didn’t give up, though. That TARDIS… I was… in the end it became my home. I was following all these leads, trying to follow up on any sightings of you, but everything was old and I wasn’t able to get anywhere; I was speaking to all these people online and on the phone who didn’t even know you’d regenerated and it wasn’t getting me any leads but I couldn’t give up, could I? I couldn’t just… you needed us. And Ryan and Graham tried to tell me… they tried to warn me that I was getting too involved, that I was… that I was trying to be you, but I couldn’t accept it. I wouldn’t. Even though a tiny part of me really thought you weren’t coming back. But then you showed up in your bloody TARDIS, ten months later, like nothing had ever happened and it was just…” Yaz shakes her head. “It was like no time had passed for you, but all the time in the world had passed for me. I’d blown everything I had apart for you, and you hadn’t changed at all.”

“More changed than you know,” the Doctor admits. “On Gallifrey… I found out who I am. I wasn’t born on Gallifrey. I’m not a Time Lord. I don’t know what I am or who I am; I’ve had lifetime after lifetime stolen away from me, the memories taken and destroyed, and I don’t… I don’t understand who I really am or what that means. And truthfully, Yaz, what they did… what my people did…”

She breaks off for a moment, looking down at her lap.

“They exploited me. They took what I am and made it part of their DNA. And I’m… angry doesn’t seem like the right word, Yaz. Angry isn’t enough. They stole every part of me and then had the audacity to openly despise me; to exile me; to ostracise me; to hurt my friends; to drag me into their wars and use me as their puppet. I don’t have the words to express that. While I was in prison, I had a lot of time to think about it; a lot of time to get angrier and angrier. But all the people who could tell me the truth are dead, the Master saw to that, and now he’s dead, so there’s no chance… there’s no-one to be angry at. There’s no-one to ask. There’s just this great, festering well of fury inside of me, and I don’t know who I am, and all that time in prison-”

“What do you mean, ‘all that time’?” Yaz interjects. “I thought…”

“Oh,” the Doctor looks back up at her then, smiling in a way that belies fully how much she is hurting beneath it all. “Few decades. Nothing major.”

“A few…”

“Thirty-eight years, six months, and thirty days.”

Yaz launches herself forward then, wrapping her arms around the Doctor and clinging to her so tightly that the Time Lady lets out a small squeak of protest. Yaz doesn’t have the words to speak, so she buries her head in the Doctor’s neck, breathing in her familiar smell of beeswax and engine oil, her throat closing up with the knowledge that for almost forty years, the Doctor had clung onto hope; the Doctor had tried to deal with this new knowledge about herself; the Doctor had been alone and afraid. Guilt wells up inside of her at the memory of standing in Graham’s lounge, the Doctor beaming uncertainly at them, and herself stepping across the carpet and shoving her backwards in fury.

“I’m sorry,” Yaz murmurs, as the Doctor’s hands come up to hold her in reciprocity. “Doctor, I’m sorry. You never…”

“I didn’t know how…”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” Yaz repeats again, pressing her face against the Doctor’s shoulder and taking a deep breath. “For everything, I’m sorry.”

The Doctor’s hand brushes over Yaz’s hair, and there’s something strangely intimate about the gesture that renders her silent as the Time Lady holds her close.

“Did you really spend that long trying to find me?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Internet. TARDIS. Few old friends of yours. More than a few, actually.”

“I’m sorry,” the Doctor tells her. “I really am. But I would never have… I didn’t mean to… I couldn’t get word to any of you…”

“I know,” Yaz says softly. “I know that now.”

They sit in silence for several minutes, both of them listening to the racing sound of the other’s heartbeat as they acknowledge all that has brought them here, to this moment.

“So,” the Doctor murmurs eventually. “Where do we go from here?”


End file.
